Plea Reveals How Manafort Manipulated the American Political System and the Media for Profit

By Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger and Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post

15 September 18

 

efore he was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort embraced extreme tactics in his lobbying efforts: He schemed “to plant some stink” and spread stories that a jailed Ukrainian politician was a murderer.

He enlisted a foreign politician who was secretly on his payroll to deliver a message to President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

And he gleefully fueled allegations that an Obama Cabinet member who had spoken out against his Ukrainian client was an anti-Semite, according to court papers.

With his guilty plea Friday, Manafort admitted the lengths to which he went to manipulate the American political system and the media for massive profit, exposing how he thrived in the Washington swamp that Trump railed against during his campaign.

The president has dismissed the allegations against his former campaign chairman as run-of-the-mill lobbying — and has even contemplated pardoning him. But new details revealed Friday show how far beyond the law Manafort went in pursuit of his goals.

By pleading guilty, Manafort agreed that he knew he was required by law to publicly report that a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party was paying him and his stable of lobbyists, which included former leaders of Austria, Poland and Italy.

Instead, he operated in the dark, working diligently to keep his lobbying for Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych a secret and pocketing millions routed through offshore bank accounts to hide his work and avoid paying taxes.

“This is extraordinary,” said Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor who served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow.

“I was well aware at the time that Manafort was making efforts to present Yanukovych in the best light,” McFaul said, but added that he had no idea of the extent of Manafort’s elaborate schemes.

The prosecution of Manafort by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has drawn in players from across the political spectrum, including pillars of the Washington lobbying and legal community like Mercury Public Affairs; the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom law firm; and the now-defunct Podesta Group, helmed by Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta.

Trump has downplayed Manafort’s wrongdoing, writing in an August tweet that he felt “very badly” for his former campaign chairman. “What he did, some of the charges they threw against him, every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does,” the president told Fox News the following day.

Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, told The Washington Post on Friday that the president “knows how badly Manafort has been treated, worse than organized criminals are treated.”

During his populist outsider campaign, Trump promised to stamp out such influence-peddling, which critics note is still thriving in Washington.

“While Manafort’s violations are brazen, I’m afraid that with a little digging, the Justice Department would find a fair number of violations,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the watchdog group Common Cause.

Paul Miller, who runs the Institute for Lobbying and Ethics, a trade association that represents state and federal lobbyists, acknowledged that there is a “widespread problem” of lobbyists failing to register their activities.

But Manafort went far beyond that, Miller said, adding that the details revealed in court filings Friday are “in no way a reflection of the whole lobbying community.”

Manafort, 69, a political operative who had worked for Republican presidential candidates such as Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, helped pioneer the Washington lobbying industry when he founded a firm in the 1980s that specialized in spiffing up the reputations of some of the world’s most controversial leaders, including Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.

He once testified to Congress that while the technical term for his work was “lobbying .?.?. I will admit that, in a narrow sense, some people might term it ‘influence peddling.’?”

Manafort was brought to Ukraine in 2005 by wealthy businessman Rinat Akhmetov, who persuaded him to put his talents to work on behalf of the Party of Regions, a pro-Russia group in that country whose candidate, Yanukovych, had just lost a contested election and was looking for a comeback.

He imported into Ukraine the data-driven, image-obsessed political tactics of American campaigns. Plans were drawn up for an ad riffing on the TV show “Mad Men” and another inspired by Reagan. A rally would feature confetti cannons and a balloon drop. Yanukovych, voters were told, would “Make Ukraine Work Again.”

Under Manafort’s direction, Yanukovych’s party made advances in parliamentary elections, and in 2010, he was elected Ukraine’s president. He served until 2014, when he was ousted by public protests and fled to Moscow.

Court documents show that Manafort devised a complex and secretive lobbying campaign to rebrand Yanukovych, who was dogged by corruption charges, as an earnest, pro-Western reformer.

American law, seldom enforced until recently, requires that anyone lobbying government officials or working to shape public opinion in the United States on behalf of a foreign government or political party register with the Justice Department.

But Manafort never registered. And prosecutors said he was so intent on avoiding public disclosure that he worked to persuade one firm assisting the effort to not disclose its work publicly, either. The firm did not do so until a year later, after its role in the Manafort project ended.

Manafort helped form a ­Brussels-based organization, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, as a mouthpiece for Yanukovych. It contracted with two prominent D.C. lobbying and communications firms — Mercury and the Podesta Group — to advance the strongman’s interests and obscure Manafort’s role.

A Mercury partner, Michael McKeon, said the firm has “fully cooperated” with the inquiry. He noted that Mercury filed domestic lobbying disclosures for the work and chose not to file foreign lobbying reports on the advice of counsel. A spokeswoman for Podesta, Molly Levinson, said that firm, too, had cooperated with the investigation and had filed public disclosure reports of its work related to Ukraine.

Manafort also hired a group of four former government officials from other countries, including the former chancellor of Austria, the former president of Poland and the former prime minister of Italy, making it appear that European leaders were organically advocating positions helpful to his client, according to court papers.

In fact, prosecutors said, the officials, whom Manafort dubbed the Hapsburg Group, were paid 2 million euros, routed through Manafort’s offshore bank accounts.

Prosecutors revealed Friday that Manafort was even able to get one member of the group into the Oval Office in May 2013 during a trip accompanying the prime minister of his country. At the meeting with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, the former official delivered a message about Ukraine, Manafort was later told in an email.

Public records show that Obama met with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that day. A Turkish Embassy spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

In all, prosecutors say, Manafort’s team lobbied dozens of members of Congress, as well as White House and State Department officials.

In 2011, Manafort’s task became more difficult after Yanu­kovych’s leading political rival, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, was jailed and put on trial, a development that was widely condemned by human rights leaders as political persecution.

Manafort’s plea documents the extraordinary lengths he went to in order to undermine her cause.

The year after she was convicted, prosecutors said, Manafort worked to convince Americans that they should not back Tymoshenko because she had formed an alliance with a party that espoused anti-Semitic views in Ukraine.

The goal, he wrote at the time, was to convince “[O]bama jews” to pressure the administration to back Yanukovych. He spread stories that a senior Cabinet official was supporting anti-Semitism by taking up Tymo­shenko’s cause, and he tipped off the media to an Israeli government statement about her Ukraine ties.

“I have someone pushing it on the NY Post. Bada bing bada boom,” he wrote to a public relations manager working with his effort.

The Cabinet official appears to have been then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had criticized Yanukovych.

Prosecutors said Manafort even tried to get stories planted that Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of another Ukrainian official. The story should be “pushed” with “no fingerprints,” he wrote to a colleague. “My goal is to plant some stink on Tymo.”

Kenneth McCallion, a lawyer for Tymoshenko, said in an interview Friday, “We did not know that it went to this level.”

In 2012, Manafort commissioned the white-shoe law firm Skadden Arps to write a report analyzing Tymoshenko’s trial. Publicly, the report was billed as an independent assessment of the Ukrainian justice system. But prosecutors say Manafort was informed by the firm in writing before its report was complete that there was virtually no evidence that Tymoshenko had held criminal intent.

Still, Manafort organized a secret global campaign to promote the report’s finding that her conviction had not been politically motivated. He also helped hide the fact that Skadden had been paid $4.6 million for its work, though Ukrainian officials publicly claimed it cost only $12,000.

Even after he was charged with working as an unregistered lobbyist, prosecutors said, Manafort continued to take steps to obscure his work through Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian colleague who had worked with Manafort and contacted witnesses in the case to try to influence their testimony.

The FBI has said that Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence. Charged alongside Manafort, he is now believed to be living in Moscow, a fugitive from U.S. justice.

This Is How the World Ends: Will We Soon See Category 6 Hurricanes?

By Jeff Nesbit, Guardian UK

15 September 18

There is no such thing as a category 6 hurricane or tropical storm - yet. But a combination of warmer oceans and more water in the atmosphere could make the devastation of 2017 pale in comparison

here is no such thing as a category 6 hurricane or tropical storm – yet. The highest level – the top of the scale for the most powerful, most devastating hurricane or tropical storm capable of destroying entire cities like New Orleans or New York – is a category 5 storm.

Meteorologists and scientists never imagined that there would be a need for a category 6 storm, with winds that exceed 200 miles per hour on a sustained basis, sweeping away everything in its path. Until now, such a storm wasn’t possible, so there was no need for a new category above category 5.

Right now, however, there is anywhere from 5 to 8% more water vapor circulating throughout the atmosphere than there was a generation ago. This, combined with warmer temperatures that are driving water up from the deep ocean in places where hurricanes typically form, has created the potential for superstorms that we haven’t seen before – and aren’t really prepared for.

This combination of warmer oceans and more water in the earth’s atmosphere – whipsawed by sustained periods of drier and wetter conditions in regions of the world that create superstorms – is now starting to create storms with conditions that look precisely what a category 6 hurricane would look like.

No one in America has ever experienced the wrath and fury of a category 6 hurricane, which now genuinely seems possible and realistic. We’ve been lucky. Unofficial category 6 hurricanes have appeared in other parts of the world, and we’re seeing much stronger storms on a regular basis. It’s only a matter of time before one hits the US.

When it does, it will come as quite a shock. The devastation we saw in 2017 in Houston, several Caribbean islands, and Puerto Rico may actually pale in comparison.

Jeff Masters, one of the most respected meteorologists in America, has begun to wonder publicly about the potential for a category 6 hurricane. He launched a lively debate among his colleagues with a provocative post in July of 2016 on the Weather Underground – a thought-provoking piece that prompted the Weather Channel and others to weigh in with their thoughts and theories as well.

“A ‘black swan’ hurricane – a storm so extreme and wholly unprecedented that no one could have expected it – hit the Lesser Antilles Islands in October 1780,” Masters wrote to open the post. “Deservedly called The Great Hurricane of 1780, no Atlantic hurricane in history has matched its death toll of 22,000. So intense were the winds of the Great Hurricane that it peeled the bark off of trees – something only EF5 tornadoes with winds in excess of 200mph have been known to do.”

Masters then made the startling claim that such a “black swan” hurricane was not only possible now but almost certain to occur more than once. He said that such storms should more properly be called “grey swan” hurricanes because the emerging science clearly showed that such “bark-stripping” mega-storms are nearly certain to start appearing.

“Hurricanes even more extreme than the Great Hurricane of 1780 can occur in a warming climate, and can be anticipated by combining physical knowledge with historical data,” wrote Masters, who once flew into the strongest hurricane at the time as one of Noaa’s “Hurricane Hunters” in the 1980s. “Such storms, which have never occurred in the historical record, can be referred to as ‘grey swan’ hurricanes.”

Masters based his bold prediction on research by two of the best hurricane scientists in the world – Kerry Emanuel of MIT and Ning Lin of Princeton – who published the most detailed hurricane model in history in August 2015. Emanuel and Lin’s hurricane model was embedded within six different worldwide climate models routinely run by supercomputers.

“The term ‘black swan’ is a metaphor for a high-consequence event that comes as a surprise. Some high-consequence events that are unobserved and unanticipated may nevertheless be predictable,” they wrote in Nature Climate Change. “Such events may be referred to as ‘grey swans’ (or, sometimes, ‘perfect storms’). Unlike truly unpredicted and unavoidable black swans, which can be dealt with only by fast reaction and recovery, grey swans – although also novel and outside experience – can be better foreseen and systematically prepared for.”

Lin and Emanuel said their research showed that not only were grey swan hurricanes now likely to occur, one such devastating hurricane would almost certainly hit the Persian Gulf region – a place where tropical cyclones have never even been seen in history. They identified a “potentially large risk in the Persian Gulf, where tropical cyclones have never been recorded, and larger-than-expected threats in Cairns, Australia, and Tampa, Florida”.

Emanuel and Lin showed that the risk of such extreme grey swan hurricanes in Tampa, Cairns, and the Persian Gulf increased by up to a factor of 14 over time as Earth’s climate changed.

In the event of such a storm, city officials may have no idea what they truly face. At least one city planning document (from 2010) anticipated that a category 5 hurricane could cause 2,000 deaths and $250bn in damage. But it could be far worse.

“A storm surge of 5 meters is about 17 feet, which would put most of Tampa underwater, even before the sea level rises there,” Emanuel told reporters. “Tampa needs to have a good evacuation plan, and I don’t know if they’re really that aware of the risks they actually face.”

A city like Dubai is even more unprepared, Emanuel said. Dubai, and the rest of the Persian Gulf, has never seen a hurricane in recorded history. Any hurricane, of any magnitude, would be an unprecedented event. But his models say that one is likely to occur there at some point.

“Dubai is a city that’s undergone a really rapid expansion in recent years, and people who have been building it up have been completely unaware that that city might someday have a severe hurricane,” Emanuel said. “Now they may want to think about elevating buildings or houses, or building a seawall to somehow protect them, just in case.”

Following Masters’s provocative post, many of his meteorologist colleagues weighed in. The Weather Channel predicted that a category 6 hurricane, and a change in the scale to accommodate it, may be on its way.

“Jeff Masters got the entire weather community thinking: could there be a Category Six hurricane?” Brian Donegan wrote on the network’s site. “Last year, Hurricane Patricia reached maximum sustained winds of 215mph in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It was the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.”

A fellow meteorologist, Paul Huttner, said Patricia makes it all but certain that we’ll see category 6 hurricanes. “Many meteorological observers [were] stunned at how rapidly Patricia blew up from tropical storm to one of the strongest category 5 hurricanes on earth in just 24 hours,” Huttner wrote for Minnesota Public Radio.

Whether we call them category 6 hurricanes – or simply category 5 hurricanes with really fast, violent winds that are up to 60mph above the upper end of the current scale that can appear literally overnight over warm oceans – we need to be ready for these superstorms capable of taking out cities like Dubai or Tampa. They are here, right now. The devastation we saw in Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean in the fall of 2017 is a clear warning.

We ignore the implications at our peril.